It’s not even the first Friday of the new year — the Trump presidency itself isn’t even one year old yet (that happens Jan. 20) — and already American politics is off the rails.

Donald Trump’s political BFF, Steve Bannon is quoted calling a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” In comments from a new book on Trump World by Michael Wolff, due for release next week, Bannon goes on to predict that “money laundering” — specifically involving Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — is going to bring down the House of Trump and investigators “are going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” Trump said in a released statement.

“Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory. … Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.”

And there may have been something about Bannon’s mother, too, I’ll have to check my notes.

Obviously, this is not the way presidents usually behave. Then again, presidents don’t usually hire guys from fringe, alt-Right websites that publish idiotic articles (like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy”) to be their chief White House strategist either.

Both Trump and Bannon are — ahem — “nontraditional” political figures. But only one of them has, as Trump put it, “a bigger and more powerful button. And it works.”

Trump does, in fact, have a button on his desk, but it doesn’t launch nukes. It sends a valet into the Oval Office bringing a Diet Coke. And I for one am OK with that.

Indeed, I am entirely fine with a Trump/Bannon bar fight, in the same way that I was OK with the Iran/Iraq War. (“It’s a pity both sides can’t lose,” as Henry Kissinger put it.) The more damage they do to each other, the more good they do for our democracy. And it’s already showing.

For one thing, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has a big smile on his face today. The Bannon project to mount primary challenges against GOP senators who’ve failed to show proper fealty to Trump took a big hit when Bannon lost POTUS’ backing. The majority leader was so happy when the Trump attack on Bannon hit yesterday, he even joined Trump in the Twitter pool: A GIF image of a smiling Mitch McConnell, beaming at all he surveyed.

And he’s not alone.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is almost certain to run for the Utah Senate seat being vacated by the retirement of Republican Orrin Hatch. For weeks, there have been reports that Trump was pressuring the 83-year-old Hatch to run for an eighth term in order to keep Romney out of the U.S. Senate. The Utah Senate race was shaping up to be a proxy war between the Bannononites and the #NeverTrumpers. Bannon was reportedly mulling an override of his anti-incumbent project to issue an endorsement of “establishment insider” Hatch in order to block his mortal enemy Mitt.

But now? That’s so 2017. Thanks to “any enemy of my enemy” politics, Mitt could wind up the White House’s favorite — or least un-favorite — candidate in the Beehive State, should Bannon recruit a serious opponent.

Not that Bannon could stop Mitt in the first place. Utah is not exactly Trump Country. While Trump beat Hillary there, he lost the GOP primary to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz by a jaw-dropping 55 points. And as former Romney spokesperson Ryan Williams told me on yesterday’s podcast, that was before Bannon’s back-firing anti-Mormon attack on Mitt during the Alabama Senate race.

“Bannon called Mitt a draft dodger because of his work on his church mission,” Williams said. “And that did not play well in Utah. It was insulting to the people of the LDS faith, and there are a lot of them in Utah.

“So I don’t think Bannon has ingratiated himself with the electorate,” Williams said.

It’s not a stretch to say that, by making Mormonism an issue, Bannon all but ensured that Mitt Romney will be elected to the U.S. Senate and become the face of anti-Trump resistance inside the GOP.

Which, despite Bannon’s self-promoted reputation as a political guru, I’m pretty sure wasn’t the original plan.

Michael Graham is a regular contributor to the Boston Herald. His daily podcast is available at www.MichaelGraham.com.